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Taking Drugs to Stave Off Anthrax May Be Hopeless. Part 2

Autor Ryan

Antibiotics, including penicillin and doxycyline, exist to treat anthrax infection. “But there are concerns that the anthrax that is used for weapons purposes may have been altered so that [these drugs] might not work,” Anderson says.

But Bayer Corp.’s Cipro — used in the United States since 1987 to treat a range of problems, from lower respiratory tract infections and gonorrhea to bone infections and typhoid fever — was approved in August 2000 by the Food and Drug Administration for use specifically against inhaled anthrax. Bayer sought the approval at the urging of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the company said at an approval hearing.

Dosage recommendations say adults who’ve been exposed should take 500 milligrams orally twice a day for 60 days.

But that, too, may not be as simple as it sounds.

“Anthrax is not something you can smell or taste or detect, so you don’t know that you’ve been exposed,” Anderson says. “So how do you know when you need to treat yourself? And it doesn’t work unless you get it into yourself very, very quickly — within the first day or two after you’ve been exposed.”

“So the practical reality is that, for it to work, you’d have to take Cipro every single day of your life for the rest of your life,” he says. “That’s expensive, and very impractical.”

It also could lead to other problems, Anderson says.

Like all drugs, Cipro has side effects, he says, including problems with bone and cartilage development. The FDA, in fact, acknowledged in its announcement approving the drug for inhaled anthrax treatment that only the lethal nature of the use of anthrax as a biological agent prompted the agency to override concerns about long-term safety of the drug.

In addition, there could be the problem of Cipro becoming resistant to organisms it normally would fight because of continuing, long-term use, Anderson says.

“People [who've stocked up] are going to have this stuff around, and if they start getting a cold, a viral infection, they’ll start to dose themselves,” he says, “and that will increase the likelihood of developing resistance.”

Taking this antibiotic as a preventive — or even keeping it in your medicine cabinet just in case — “doesn’t make any sense,” Anderson says. “It’s not very good use of dollars or of medicine.”

Biological terrorism is “very expensive, very difficult and has a relatively low likelihood,” he says. “That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t conduct research, or do things to try to prevent terrorist actions from taking place. But for most ordinary folks walking around, the likelihood of an attack by a biological weapon is fairly low.”

Should that happen, however, federal government officials contend that quick response by federal agencies could contain any epidemic.

“We’re prepared to take care of any contingency, any consequence that develops from a biological attack,” U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson said this week in an interview on the CBS program “60 Minutes.”

“I don’t think the American public should go out and stockpile antibiotics,” Thompson said. “We have enough to treat 2 million people for 60 days.”

Still, many people have opted to make their own preparations, hoarding antibiotics, water, and the like.

“In a lot of ways,” Wartell says, “succumbing to this kind of fear plays into the hands of the folks who would like to terrorize us — and I think that’s a shame.”

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